Mostly a photography related blog. Think About Photography refers to being ready for getting a photo at all times. This generally means carry your camera around with you as much as possible. Even without a camera, I am imagining how scenes would look in a photo..

Tuesday, August 11, 2009

Free Image Viewer Software

FastStone Image Viewer is one of the coolest image viewer available. I use Adobe Lightroom and Adobe Photoshop most of the time, but for some things it's faster and easier to use FastStone Image Viewer. And it is FREE.

First of all - it loads much faster. It supports most mainstream RAW camera formats. It displays photos in folders as thumbnails. It has full screen previews. All of the normal stuff for viewing photos.

FastStone also has pretty good image editing features. It is not Photoshop but it does have a lot of editing features. And it is FREE.

And what makes FastStone really GREAT is any or all of these features can be combined on a group of photos.

FastStone also has a slideshow function. It will also print contact sheets from selected images. It will generate multipage files from a group of images. It will break up multipage files into single images. It will make an "image strip". This is a series of individual images combine into a "strip" of images. The images can be resized at the same time. This is cool.

FastStone also has a compare funtion. You select multiple images and display them all at the same time. This is good for selecting the best out of similar shots.

The list of functionality goes on. These features are my favorite.

You owe it to yourself to go and checkout the latest version. Someday you'll need it.